Each year we send a survey to all admitted undergraduate students who accept or decline their offer of admission. Our goal is to understand why students choose to come to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or choose to go elsewhere, and what matters most when making that decision. We also try to assess how UIUC performs when it comes to counseling, communications, customer service, and more. This report provides an overview of key insights, takeaways, and recommendations. Survey Participation 601 accepts 57 declines Main Takeaways Cost remains the number-one reason why students decline [...]

View accept survey data View decline survey data Each year we send a survey to all admitted undergraduate students who accept or decline their offer of admission. Our goal is to understand why students choose to come to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or choose to go elsewhere, and what matters most when making that decision. We also try to assess how UIUC performs when it comes to counseling, communications, customer service, and more. Full accept survey results and full decline survey results are available to the R&Y Network and can be filtered several ways, including by college. This report [...]

Why Do Metrics Matter? Metrics allow us to measure our progress toward goals and ensure our efforts are making an impact. Without metrics, it's impossible to know if our hard work or strategy is paying off. But what measurements of success matter? Of all the information and analytics available, which metrics should we look at the most? Organic Social Media Social media analytics offer many different metrics. Which ones matter the most depend on your campaign goals. If we think of social media as an extension of our awareness and content marketing efforts, we care most about the reach and impressions [...]

What Makes a Good Survey? Sampling Sample, sample, sample. The goal of any good survey is to find out what people think to inform a decision or many future decisions. For that reason, you should plan to talk to a lot of people and a diverse range of people. A healthy sample size is critical to getting usable information. If you do not get many opinions, one person (or a few people) can skew your results. So what is a healthy sample? Refer to the chart in Survey Monkey's article on sampling. As a rule of thumb, if your target population [...]

How to Evaluate Communications & Marketing Success There are many ways to evaluate success, and you should always keep your campaign goals in mind. Preferably, you and your team should make a plan to evaluate success prior to the launch of a campaign in order to then tailor the campaign to succeed on your key metrics. Remember, some evaluation is certainly better than none. If you have limited time to evaluate, that's OK. Pick an evaluation method you can achieve or ask for help. Contact OUA if you're evaluating your admissions marketing success or making a plan to do so in [...]